Kane County bridging gap in road project

Work under way near Fox River

More than a year since ending a decades-long wait for work to begin on a new regional bridge over the Fox River, the Stearns Road corridor project in mid-Kane County is showing signs of progress.

"It's really starting to look like a highway project out there," Carl Schoedel, county director of transportation, said of the $165 million east-west highway connection.

"The plan is to have everything open to traffic by [late] 2010," he said during a recent County Board briefing, which coincided with the one-year anniversary of the project's groundbreaking along the eastern bank of the Fox River near South Elgin.

County Board Chairman Karen McConnaughay has dubbed the new 4.6-mile regional bridge corridor "the single largest and most significant transportation infrastructure project in the [county's] history."

The multiyear plan for the Stearns corridor calls for construction of two 12-foot-wide highway lanes in each direction "to make a regional connection between Randall Road and DuPage County," Schoedel said.

Intersections with signals are planned for Randall Road, McLean Boulevard, Illinois Highway 25 and Dunham Road. In addition to an 1,100-foot, four-lane highway span over the Fox River, roughly a dozen smaller bridges are included in the project.

Some of the most observable work being done during the first of six construction stages scheduled over the next few years involves the installation of an Illinois Highway 31 bridge over Stearns Road, Schoedel said.

Construction contracts for the bulk of the project, estimated to cost $94.5 million, are scheduled to be awarded in June 2009, he said.

In addition, more than half the land parcels needed for corridor right of way still need to be acquired, Schoedel said.

Of the 73 parcels needed, 30 have been acquired, with the balance in the negotiation or appraisal stages. Right of way for the entire project must be completed by mid-2009, he said.

Assuming that 20 months typically are required for parcels to go through a condemnation process, some of the parcels over which the county and state are negotiating with property owners could be targeted for eminent domain.

The original study of potential Fox River highway crossings that resulted in the Stearns Road corridor project was started in 1990.